Cocktail hour sponsored by Brookhaven Science Associates (BSA) that immediately preceded the special session on "Diversity in Physics: What can we do better?" (Photograph by Brant Johnson.)

Welcome to RHIC News

We hope that this web publication will in some small measure reflect the excitement of the RHIC and AGS program at Brookhaven, as explained by some of the people who are doing the experiments, analyzing the data, and writing the papers.

Why So Few? How to Increase the Number of Women in Science
By Meg Urry
Everyone agrees there are too few women and minorities in science. But then opinions diverge, at least among scientists. Many believe that increasing diversity is a matter of social engineering, done for the greater good of society, but requiring a lowering standards and thus conflicting with excellence. Among this group are very well-meaning people who genuinely wish to increase the number of women colleagues. Yet they may be doing more harm than good.  More...

Brownian Motion in the Color Field: Charmed Hadron Production at Low Transverse Momentum in Au+Au Collisions at RHIC
By Zhangbu Xu and Yifei Zhang
Measurements of charm production at low transverse momentum (pT), in particular radial and elliptic flow, probe the QCD medium at thermal scales and are thus sensitive to bulk medium properties like density and the drag constant or viscosity. Model treatments for low-pT charm production, such as energy loss by collisional dissociation and in-medium transport using a diffusion formalism (in analog to Brownian motion) and resonance cross sections, can be used to infer transport properties such as interaction cross sections and the medium density.  More...

Indications of Conical Emission of Charged Hadrons at RHIC
By Jason G. Ulery and Fuqiang Wang
When an object moves in a medium at supersonic speed, its interaction with the medium may generate sonic shock waves. The sound wave front forms a cone, called a Mach cone, with an opening angle of π/2-θ with respect the object’s direction of motion, where θ; is called the Mach cone angle. This phenomenon is familiar, whose most common example is a supersonic airplane producing condensation vapor cloud of a Mach cone shape. Now at Brookhaven’s Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC), experimental evidence of conical emission of subatomic particles is observed in high energy nucleus-nucleus collisions, which can presently only be explained by Mach cone shock waves. The STAR collaboration has submitted a paper on their finding to Physical Review Letters.  More...

Users' e-Log
Short news items of interest to the RHIC/AGS community. This week: P5 Report. More...